Shudder of the Mailer Daemon is the final book of the Lychee Kamiki series about everyone’s favorite high schooler prostitute detective. It’s probably the weakest novel of the bunch, but a fitting finale to the series.
The story concerns the investigation into the Mailer Daemon case, where each victim received a text announcing their murder a week before their death. The texts come from “mailer daemon” email addresses, hence the name of the case. It’s an interesting idea but quite different from a traditional murder set-up, and so unsurprisingly Murder Daemon has a unique structure as well.The book can essentially be divided into three parts. The first part is a short puzzle story. The second part goes to the halfway point and contains the main thrust of the Mailer Daemon case. This part culminates with a murder that is fun but relatively easy to solve. The final part consists of an intricate but contrived logic puzzle.
While the second part focuses on the details of the Mailer Daemon case, I feel like the third part is the core idea of the novel. And it’s not bad, but I’m not sure we get back everything we put into it. The issue is that the setup feels thoroughly contrived and artificial in almost every metric, from the architecture to the building procedures to information presented. The logic is fun, but the conclusions are not nearly as bombastic as in the previous books.
The unique gimmick of the Lychee Kamiki series is the sex, and even that is restrained here. In the previous books sex was tightly woven into the core of the stories to create ridiculous reveals, but in Mailer Daemon it’s basically used as a hand-wave for the motive in a way that feel antithetical to actual human emotion. There are a few more places where sex pops up, but again, in ways that are not nearly as interesting as the previous books.
Yabusaka’s books also tend to go into a deep dive on some random topic, such as snakes in Locked Rooms of the Twin Snakes, and here that topic is flip phones and smartphones, but the dive just isn’t quite as deep or as interesting.
On the other hand, the procession of logic of the third part is extraordinarily fun, if you’ve read the other books in the series. I don’t want to spoil the exact set-up, but it’s a great payoff and send off of everything that previously occurred in the series.
I realized a while ago that it seemed that no new Lychee Kamiki books were getting released, and felt disappointed that the series appeared to be over given how much I liked the previous books. But seeing Shudder of the Mailer Daemon and comparing it to the previous books makes me think that maybe Yabusaka was just starting to lose steam on this idea… which is perfectly understandable, since writing mysteries is hard, and having to tie them into crazy sex tricks just makes it even harder! Despite all that he was still able to create a great conclusion to this series, and if he was running low I’d much rather the end here on a high note than drag things out past the point of enjoyability. If you’ve gotten this far into the series it is absolutely worth finishing out, but if you haven’t you definitely want to start at the beginning.
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